


Strangers in a Strange Land

by coldcobalt



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Gen, everyone has ptsd: the manga
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-02
Updated: 2018-04-02
Packaged: 2019-04-17 04:23:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14180523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldcobalt/pseuds/coldcobalt
Summary: “What do you dream about?” Scar asks.“That building!” Mei wails, “Those tunnels! Those monsters under the city; the ones with too many legs and shiny eyes!”Scar thinks of the chimeras, once-humans contorted to shapes of beasts, hands grasping in the darkness of the tunnels. Sharp teeth glinting in the half-light.He sees these things through a child’s eyes, and understands.Mei has nightmares. She and Scar have this in common.





	Strangers in a Strange Land

**Author's Note:**

> You will pry the found family trope from my cold, dead fingers.

The yellow moon hangs low over the industrial district, eerily bright in the starless sky.

East of the capital city, Amestris dissolves into abandoned factories and derelict warehouses; buildings with broken windows and strewn with debris. In these early-morning hours, the streets lie deserted.  
This is the fifth night with no disturbances. It seems the military has forgotten this corner of the country as well.

Camp is a warehouse tonight, an abandoned plastics factory thick with the smell of burnt rubber. Torn newspapers and spent crude barrels line the floor, and the group’s footsteps echo distantly in the empty halls. But it’s shelter nonetheless, and that’s perhaps blessing enough.

So tonight, (or this morning, no way to tell in these cold, dead hours), Scar takes second watch.  
Yoki took both shifts after the fight with the Elric brothers, a skirmish that left Scar dazed and bleeding from a knife wound perilously close to his iliac artery. It’s only fitting to pay Yoki back in turn. Scar is nothing if not fair.

Something skitters behind him in the darkness.

He whirls around, fists raised, alchemy coursing through his fingers in white-hot arcs -- but it’s only the little Easterner girl, wrapped in the oversized fabric of one of Yoki’s shirts.

“Mr. Scar!” she says, rubbing eyes heavy with exhaustion, “Xiao Mei can’t sleep!”

\------------

It turns out Mei crossed the desert woefully underprepared. Almost no supplies: the clothes on her back, some jugs of water, her alkahestry knives. Not even a blanket.  
But she made sure to pack enough bamboo for her companion, even though it meant carrying a heavier pack.

“I had to!” she says -- quietly, to avoid waking Yoki, who is snoring under a table -- “she’s such a picky eater! I had no problem carrying the extra weight for her.”

She climbs up onto a rusty filing cabinet and leans back against the wall. The gap in her baby teeth shows when she grins.

“It got a little dicey towards the end -- I almost ran out of water, but Xiao Mei sniffed out an underground river for me! So I’m glad I wasn’t travelling alone.”

She curls in on herself, and the smile vanishes, quick as lightning.  
“But now she’s having nightmares. She’s so scared of having another one that she can’t even close her eyes.”

Scar looks over at the panda, which is clearly slumbering deeply, and says nothing. A pause for a second. Two.

She curls in further, hands covering her face in shame.  
“Okay! I lied! It’s me who can’t sleep!”

She gestures to the window, arms flung wide. The spread of city lights blankets the horizon, burning bright even in the dead hours of the morning.

“This country is wrong. Its chi is _wrong_ , its alchemy is _wrong_ , the monsters in the sewers are all _wrong wrong wrong_.”

She leans forward, eyes wide in the warehouse gloom.  
“What if they come back?”

Her voice cuts off in a little squeak and oh, Ishvalla, she is so _young_. Ten at most, he’d guess, if he were being generous.

The youngest monks had been ten, too.

 

\---------

The youngest monks. He hasn’t thought of them in years.

They were to be the next generation of temple caretakers, the future priesthood of Ishval. Children who had felt their creator’s calling and thought: this is what I was born for.

The little ones had been hard to tutor. Scar hadn’t had the patience in his twenties, had been more concerned with his own spiritual quest, but caretaking had been a required task, and he couldn’t avoid it forever, temper or no.  
After months of managing to wriggle out of child-sitting duties, his master finally wised up.

 _Don’t look so glum, it’s just tutoring_ , his master had said, leading a gaggle of nervous figures into the temple courtyard. _Some reading, some writing, a ceremonial duty or two._

Scar mumbled some excuse, but his master had seen right through it.

 _Children aren’t harder than adults to work with_ , he’d responded, cutting off Scar’s protest, _just different. But for our future, it’s our responsibility to teach young minds about the wonders of this world._

And so his master had left him to the crowd.

There had been a learning curve at first -- some flared tempers, some shouts of _don’t eat that!_ and _leave those birds alone!_ But his master had been right; children were no harder than adults to work with, just different in their needs. What surprised him most was that they were all unique. Such massively varied personalities wrapped up in such tiny bodies.

Durdona,  
_(shot)_  
who could draw anything from memory, who once drew a stylized likeness of Scar so accurate that it drove his brother to hysterics.  
_She captured your expression perfectly_ he’d said, gesturing at the curved line of a deep frown. An argument had ensued, but his brother had been right.

Timur,  
_(struck by debris)_  
who had problems with written words: the archival scrolls, the prayer tomes, his own name. The characters flipped and inverted before his eyes, he’d said, and refused to speak in group lessons after that.

But the two of them practiced together, and when Timur could finally sing a hymn from the dog-eared songbook without pausing for help, he threw his arms around Scar and cried.

Ruslan,  
_(immolated by alchemical flame)_  
who dreamed of excavating Xerxes, mapping its hidden treasures. When Scar was assigned work in the archives, he sometimes found Ruslan sleeping in the stacks, surrounded by books

Those children, Ishval’s future: all gone. Gone and never to be buried, their bones ground to dust by the bombings and abandoned to the winds.

 

 

\---------

And now Mei _(alive)_ : brave enough to cross the wastelands, but scared of this new city. _Children are different._

“What do you dream about?” Scar asks.

“That building!” Mei wails, “Those tunnels! Those monsters, the ones with too many legs and shiny eyes!”

Scar thinks of the chimeras, once-humans contorted to shapes of beasts, hands grasping in the darkness of the tunnels. Sharp teeth glinting in the half-light. He thinks of these things through a child’s eyes, and understands.

He nods, once, and relief floods her face.

“I thought you’d make fun of me. I made it across the desert on my own -- well, with Xiao Xiao -- but it’s Amestris that makes me nervous.”

She’s silent for a second, hesitant. Then: “Do you have nightmares too?”

Scar keeps his expression carefully neutral. He is the scourge of the military. He does not have bad dreams.

“Sorry!” she says, embarrassed, “I just...you don’t seem to sleep much, and I thought --”

Truthfully, Mei thinks correctly. Every time he closes his eyes, Scar sees ivory rubble, the Kanda district rent in two.  
A man dressed in white stands above the ruined streets ( _a demon_ , he’d thought at first, but it had only ever been a man), face distorted by a rictus grin of pure glee.

And then: the screams, the blood, Kimblee’s laughter. And he would awaken, hands trembling, heart beating frantically in his ears.

( _You must live_ , his overbearing older brother had said, a last wish whispered upon the killing fields. How could he have known the fate he was imposing: a life forever shaped by absence, a screaming void of all that had been lost?)

“Do you miss your country?” she asks.  
A safer question. He could explain to her that, on paper, his homeland has been annexed. In theory, he is Amestrian.  
But that’s a technicality at best, and not what she really wants to know.

The thought of Ishval is shrapnel in his ribs, the tang of spent gunpowder on his tongue.

“Yes, I miss it. As it was before.”

She nods, understanding.  
“Me too. I mean, we were poor and sad and I had to share my bed with my two sisters. It rains a lot in the summer and sometimes our house flooded; one time the emperor sent his tax collectors and we had to sell our only ox.” She squints. “Jingyi. I miss her.”

“But home is home.” she says, eyes glittering with a fire far older than her years. “I’m gonna make it back one day. And you will too.”

And with that, she climbs off the cabinet and lies down at Scar’s side. The blankets they’ve stolen are military-issue and scratchy, but Mei wraps herself in one without complaint.

She lies in silence for a full minute. Lights from the distant city splash in stripes across her face. And then she reaches out, placing her hand in Scar’s: his _right_ hand, his brother’s hand, the one that has brought fifteen state alchemists (and one distorted child) to bloody ruin.

“You keep watch for chimeras, okay?”

He nods.

“Good,” she says, eyes closed. “And I’ll keep watch for whatever’s scaring you, okay? Fair trade. Equivalent exchange.”  
She curls into a little ball of blanket and is asleep within seconds.

He has lost everything: his family, his homeland, the favor of his god.

 _Please_ , Scar thinks, looking down at Mei’s sleeping form, her tiny hand in his, _let me at least have this._  
His eyes droop closed of their own volition.

The warehouse sleeps silently under the Amestrian moon.


End file.
